Book dossier

The David Kopay story

by David Kopay

"Coach Vince Lombardi always told us backs to 'run to daylight.' That's exactly what I was doing that day when I reached for the phone to call Lynn Rosellini (Washington Star reporter). By that time I knew that there was nothing else I could do. My hands were shaking. It was game time. The National Anthem was playing." The time was December, 1975. David Kopay, ten-year veteran running back for the San Francisco Forty-Niners (where teammate John Brodie dubbed him "Psyche" for his aggressive play), the Detroit Lions, the Washington Redskins, the New Orleans Saints and the Green Bay Packers, had decided it was time to begin to end his long personal nightmare and publicly reveal his sexual preference for men-the first professional athlete ever to do so. To explain why he chose to do so meant revealing the conflicting emotional touchstones of an entire life, including his early education at a Catholic seminary, his co-captaincy of the 1964 University of Washington Rose Bowl team, his sexual experience with a male college classmate and later an all-pro player, his psychotherapy that, while under hypnosis, helped induce him to marry a former airline stewardess, his heartbreaking confrontations with his parents and older brother, and the unpredictable support from certain former teammates as well as others-homosexual and heterosexual-whom he'd never met... Together they comprise a story that is far more than self-exposé. With the skilled collaboration of a gifted writer, Perry Deane Young, they make up an unsparing, moving account from adolescence to maturity of one man's search for sexual identity in America today.